My episode mostly talks about the present and future uses of learning chat bots, but what about traditional chat bots, bots that existed before this time? Most people have probably heard of Cleverbot. It is a bot that only uses human input to form its responses; that is, Cleverbot only parrots what humans have said to it (Saenz). (You can check it out on its website, http://www.cleverbot.com/.)

Chat bots have existed for at least 50 years, and an example of one major chat bot from that time is named ELIZA, which would match questions asked to it with answers from a script (Weizenbaum 37). One of the more notable scripts makes ELIZA act as a psychotherapist, and at the time the script allowed ELIZA to even fool some people into thinking the bot was a real doctor. (You can check out an example implementation of that bot here: http://nlp-addiction.com/eliza/.)